"Wagner, the master of language, the mythologist and myth-maker, the philosopher, historian, aesthetician and critic, poet of previous societies, who has made simple dramas new again, and clarified the place of the arts in human culture, and understood the values of the past, and who has for the first time encircled the entire structure in one ring, and engraved the runes of his spirit on it - what an abundance of knowledge he had to accumulate and compile, in order to accomplish all this! And yet the magnitude of the task never daunted him, nor did the details and the beauty distract him."